Friday, July 27, 2012

Francis Pryor - Farmers in Prehistoric Britain

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Much of what is known about early, or
ancient farming is the subject of informed conjecture. Because
anthropologists have been able to study contemporary communities, the
lives of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies is fairly well
understood, at least in generalities. But because agricultural
communities have, over time, developed or adopted improved techniques
and technologies, we don't necessarily understand much about how the
earliest farmers lived and worked the land. Indeed as Francis Pryor
points out farming may have been through various historical stages,
it is also very much dependent on the landscape and area in which it
is practised. Farming on the British Isles, off the coast of Western
Europe in 3500 BCE was very different to farming life in the fertile
crescent when wheat was first domesticated.

Farmers in Prehistoric Britain is
a short, but important work that tries to understand a small part of
ancient farming history. Pryor concentrates on the areas of his
expertise, in particular the Flag Fen site near Peterbourgh which
Pryor has been the principle excavator and publicist for over the
years. Perhaps uniquely for archaeologists, Pryor is also a
practising farmer. Since his early work at Flag Fen he has refined
his understanding of ancient agriculture, because he has learnt how
to breed sheep and cattle. His life in a farming community has
produced insights into the way that agriculture could have been.

This doesn't always
follow. For instance, being an astronomer in the 21st century does
not necessarily give an insight into the life of Galileo
contemplating the heavens under a regime that was noted for disliking
heresy. Farming is different in many ways, as despite technological
advances, insights into the behaviour of (say) sheep when confronted
by a sheepdog for the first time, are likely to be similar to those
for ancient shepherds. In a couple of cases here, Pryor describes how
he only recognised certain features of Bronze Age farms as a result
of his own use of drove-ways to separate sheep as part of the annual
cycle of the farm.

Much of what Pryor
argues about the practise and life of ancient farmers is linked with
his wider themes, that appear in most of his other books, of ancient
ritual landscapes. These he argues mean that ancient people
considered themselves part of a much wider use of land and Pryor
extends this analogy to some of the buildings and sites he discusses
– a separation existed between (say) locations devoted to life and
burial, but they were intimately linked.

The nascent nature
of agricultural remains is a significant problem for those studying
ancient agriculture. Pryor spends sometime explaining why hedges
don't leave traces for instance, and so much of this book is devoted
to some detailed discussion of the practice of archaeology in this
context. I found some of this a little complicated, but readers who
work in the field will no doubt find it useful and illuminating.

I want to finish
this review by quoting a couple of the conclusions of the book,
because they are quite amazing. Firstly, Pryor argues that livestock
farming was the “dominant form of farming in Britain between, say,
4500 and 600 BC”. This is important because most people when
discussing agriculture probably imagine fields of wheat. Pryor is at
pains to point out that this was unlikely, despite “intensive”
farming, the production of foods (at least in the British Isles until
the Iron Age) such as wheat was likely to have been done on small
plots. Cattle and sheep rearing was the large scale agriculture of
this era of British farming. For instance, he argues that the
agricultural visible parts of Flag Fen supported a population of
2000-3000 sheep. This is large scale farming, that needed (and could
support) a big human population, as well as a wider infrastructure to
use and distribute the wool, hides and meat.

The
“millennium or so of intensive livestock farming in large parts of
lowland Britain” described by Pryor lead to a “Bronze Age
bonanza”. Overtime, population increases and the gradual
improvement of farm techniques meant that eventually, the “population
of animals suddenly passed a critical threshold and it became
necessary to parcel-up the landscape more formally”. This began a
very different era of farming and society for Bronze Age people. Over
the millenia described here, the countryside of England was
transformed. From a wooded landscape to a artificial one,
hunter-gatherer, neolithic and Bronze Age men and women fundamentally
altered and started to create the world we live in today. Pryor's
book is a good introduction to these changes and the mechanics of how
ancient farmers albeit in a small part of the world, may well have practiced their daily lives.

Note
that this book is out of print, but can be found in various second
hand sources. Parts of it are explored in more detail in several of
Pryor's other works. I'd particularly recommend Britain BC
and Seahenge for this
and other material.